Honey

We have 2011 honey available; $8 for a pint and $16 for a quart size jar.

2011 honey for sale
$8 for a pint and $16 for a quart size jar


Our bees have not been treated with any chemicals or antibiotics to combat mites or other bee problems. When extracting honey from the combs, we do not heat the honey at all - it takes longer to strain (especially in October), but that's fine. The honey has never been warmer than in the beehive! So all the enzymes and natural qualities of the honey are fully present.

In 2011, all our hives contain wild swarms that just showed up. Our neighbor has an old hollow tree filled with bees, so we expect they came from there. They seem like nice bees, industrious and focused on their work. But having these wild swarms means that all the bees that made all the honey haven't travelled by airplane, car, truck, or any way other (like most bees do); they've only travelled on their own wings.

The bees visit all around the property and the neighborhood, collecting from the flowers and pollinating our fruits. While it could be called wildflower, the bees visit squash, sunflowers, borage, kale and everything else in the garden. It takes 1 million flower visits to make a pound of honey!

Beekeeping

We started keeping bees in 2005, and we are still fairly new to this. I'm afraid we don't give the bees the attention they might deserve, they are rather on their own. We brought two hives north with us when we moved in 2009 (that was an adventure I wouldn't want to repeat), and we bought one package of bees in 2010, but we've been losing hives over the winter in the wet cold (we plan put up some protection, it's on our list of projects). Amazingly, we left the three dead hives out in spring and each one of them populated itself, so we had a decent honey crop in 2011.



The dark mass on the nearest beehive is bees, trying to decide if they want to move in. A thunderstorm later that day convinced them. As you can see, our hives are sitting around rather casually out on the east side of the sheep shed. We had put one of the dead hives off a bit until we got around to dealing with it, and that seems to be the most popular and successful; maybe it gets more sun or they prefer the doors to face south.

This is how we started.

Dad assembled and painted base, hives and top, and made a little table for the hives to sit on. The bees themselves arrived in the mail (our postman is quite understanding), in the small box you see. 3 pounds of bees is tens of thousands of individuals.



It was quite exciting to get the bees into the hive. You dump the bees in, and carefully hang the queen in her little box inside the hive

 


From time to time during the summer, I inspect the hive to make sure the queen was there and doing her job of producing baby bees.



In September, we harvest the honey. The bees don't like this very much; there's a lot of angry buzzing for a few weeks, and don't get too close to the hive. They eventually get over it.

It's a difficult, very, very messy job to extract honey with the mechnical extractor; it has to be done inside since the anyplace outside we'd encounter the resentful rightful owners.

last updated: 1/6/12